Back in grad school, I had a course on OOAD that turned out mainly to
revolve around the
subject of reuse, or, more specifically, why reuse rarely works in practice.
Some of the
conclusions I came away with.
1) Reuse is the Big Lie of the OO world; often claimed as a benefit, but
rarely realized.
2) Components (well, VBXs and OCXs) have been more successful than
library-based
reuse. (Presumably, this is because they are built using fairly standardized
idioms
(properties, events, and methods), expose a relatively simple and
well-defined
user interface, and are binary compatible with a very popular family of
development
environments.)
3) Building reusable code demands more up-front effort.
4) Once you've built your reusable components, the _real_ trick is to get
someone
else to reuse them.
#4 is really more of a social/organizational problem than a technical one,
but it's probably
the biggest reason that reuse doesn't work as well in practice as it does in
theory
. If your organization's IT efforts are balkanized hackfests where
cross-team
communication never occurs, it's wishful thinking to expect to get more
than
a trivial level of reuse.
IMHO, of course.
===========================================================================
Tom Valesky -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.patriot.net/users/tvalesky
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